Dr. Andrew Hamilton and FDIS have just announced an important opportunity for those interested in reshaping our First Year Experience: a Call for Proposals to substantially rework existing 1000-level core courses, especially the high-enrollment courses that have historically given us the biggest problems in terms of student retention.

The University is making a concerted effort to improve the undergraduate student experience with structural changes of administrative units, re-allocation of resources, improvements to housing and residential life programming, and more. The most important part of the undergraduate experience is in the classroom, and the Provost’s Office has launched a First Year Experience initiative to ensure incoming freshmen have the best possible classroom experience. The goal of these interrelated initiatives is to help students build the habits and behaviors of successful students. Because we know the high enrollment 1000-level core courses can be a particular challenge for students, our initial efforts have been focused on the academic core.

As Dr. Hamilton told the Faculty Senate last week, the goal of this initiative is to “build better sophomores.” Active learning pedagogy and better, more systematic course design will be crucial to making these courses work better overall for our student body. This initiative seems like an important step forward in our pursuit of substantive student success.

Deadline for these proposals is Feb. 1, 2013. Please direct any comments or inquiries to Dr. Hamilton at alhamil4@Central.UH.EDU.